I am off today for the annual Christmas shopping day with Mrs. News Cut. We are embracing winter!

They — and you know who they are — were using words like “nightmare” and “crippled” to describe our lives this morning. The network news weatherpeople are set up in Rochester this morning to document our Highway 52 misery. They sell us short.

This is us not being cripped on I-94 just East of St. Paul at the height of the rush hour this morning.

A few minutes ago, I took Lucie the Blog Dog for the morning walk past a group of school kids huddled in the middle of the road waiting for the bus. As near as I could tell — not speaking the language well — they weren’t talking about the snow or the weather. They were talking about whatever schoolkids talk about while waiting for the bus. A minute later, a bus raced by (going way too fast, sir) and pounded them with snow wake. Life goes on.

At the airport, flight delays were 15 minutes or less, better than on a typical day.

In the middle of the blizzard, an anonymous person getting very little sleep did what he/she does every day: deliver the newspaper.

Facing winter? it’s all in the ‘tude:

Props to the meteorologists. They got it right. I’ll figure out the winner of the first leg of the Golden Snowball Challenge later today. But as of 8:03 a.m., the official accumulation for the Minneapolis St. Paul was 6.7 inches. If that doesn’t change, that would put MPR’s Paul Huttner at the top of the heap. But KSTP’s Patrick Hammer (7.5″ prediction) is charging on the outside.

About the blogger

Bob Collins has been with Minnesota Public Radio since 1992, emigrating to Minnesota from Massachusetts where he was VP of programming for Berkshire Broadcasting Co. He was an editor at the RKO Radio Network in New York, and WHDH Radio in Boston. He is the founder of the MPR News’ website. He is a private pilot and flies an airplane he built.

This is the first year I’ve had to worry about school closings and actually really needing to be somewhere really on time. I’m all freaking out last night, checking school closings over and over … Then I stick my head out the door this morning to see how much of a disaster the world is … My first thought (after “cool, I don’t need to shovel the sidewalk”) was: this is what the panic was??? The street was perfectly driveable; I was 5 minutes later than normal having left 5 minutes earlier than usual from Powderhorn Park to University/Fairview in StPl. Other than our street, everything was plowed…?

Perhaps it is a function of how long someone has lived in Minnesota – or at least the northern Midwest. Waking up one morning in Lansing Michigan to find 30″ of snow in my yard? Now that was a ‘disaster’. Today is simply an introduction to Winter.

Momma

Old man winter blew the snow -most of it-out of my driveway so that I could take my son to school.